Moderates United

I was thinking about the opposite of laziness.  Put another way, what avoidances create what we call “laziness”.

First off, it seems to me that, from a social and personal well being perspective, we work too much.  If we take an evolutionary perspective, ants work continually, because they are best viewed as little machines.  More developed animals, the mammals, like chimps and lions and seals, have lots and lots of time for relaxation.  So too did and to some very limited extent do, hunter-gatherers.  I read somewhere their average “work week” is perhaps 20 hours.  The rest of the time they can spend telling stories, playing games or music, fucking, and just laying around.  The sense of time constraint implied by our modern concept of laziness is simply inconsistent with our recent past, and has come about only in perhaps the past 2-4 thousand years.

Secondly, because I am not opposed to the new, to development, to visions of a greater humanity, I will say that we can and should aspire to higher levels of productivity, but that we need to balance creative mania, with some grounding in our nature.

And what is our nature?  I would say it is creative, but not relentlessly so.  We need breaks.  The alternative is addiction, and addiction by definition is contrary to spiritual development.

And what blocks creativity?  Fear.  Fear of all the sundry emotions which we have blocked out, away from conscious awareness.  To be truly creative one must be open, and to be open is to invite everything.

Practically, what seems to happen is we find and build grooves, tracks, simple things we do over and over in roughly the same way which meet the task of getting us fed, clothed, and sheltered, but which do not really arise from creative places, and which on the contrary feel confining.

It is tempting to wonder if we fear Great Time, within which are the realities we fear, most notably death and dissolution, but also separation, failure, and inconstancy.

Well, I myself have things to do, but thought I would throw a few thoughts out there.

I have been having some interesting dreams.  Many of my most useful dreams involve contemporary myths, like Harry Potter, and comic book characters.  I think in our modern world we do not value sufficiently deep symbols. The need for them is profound, and people like Stan Lee and Jack Kirby and Joanne Rowling, who create them, serve this need.  The “nerds” who thrive on their true fictions are precisely those who in other ages might have been priests and priestesses, the keepers of sacrificial, ritual orders.

Without getting into the details of last night, I will say that we all need to grasp that even the bad guys are us too.  I found myself in a fight last night with a force I could not defeat.  The good guys lost, and I chose death rather than submission, consciously, after thinking about it in the dream.

Then I woke up, and got to thinking about it.  What I think I chose was preferring the death of willful ignorance, to the conscious inclusion of my own defects, which include arrogance, self importance, laziness, and yes entitlement. I am what I hate.

And I look at myself, and I preach–that is the word–often about the Left as the cult of conscious resentment.  And I resent them.  I am what I hate.

Pema Chodron talks about how interacting with people can be very useful because other people will show you, in your reactions, everything you hate about yourself, what parts of your self are unprocessed, in conflict with the facts of life, in conflict with the destiny of peace, of accommodation with the realities of life, which include death, danger, loss, grief, confusion, and the need for frequent if not continual effort and work.

Isolating oneself is a means, perhaps, of learning more about oneself, but it is also an avoidance of all the “triggers” which we encounter in others which create unwanted, painful emotions.

And it feels to me that the process of “building” virtue is really a process of subtraction.  As an example, you cannot make yourself humble.  You can merely act humble, and suppress from conscious awareness all impulses arising from vanity.  You relabel them.  You see them, but make them into positives through a process of rationalization.

The process of enabling actual, useful, honest humility–and this is a worthy virtue–is that of slowly eliminating the NEED to feel superior.  Every virtue has a countervailing vice which arises from a lack of some sort.  If we are cruel, it is because we feel unloved and unlovable.  If we are covetous, it is because we are conscious of a sense of material, and thus social, inferiority.  We want the things we feel will stimulate within us the feelings we actually need.

As someone with what gets called an “addictive personality”, what I feel is that addiction is really that process by which we divert our feelings and sense of self away from all the things we feel we cannot face and process and OWN.  Almost everything in life is either addiction or truth.

Addictions are all strong feelings that overwhelm the awareness of the weak, subtle feelings.  They are the manias, the passions, the “highs” of various sorts that people seek out to trap themselves in places where what they fear cannot find them, cannot reach their consciousness.

You can be addicted to interacting with people and still feel alone.  Many people nowadays are.  “Social” media make it easy.

But you can also be addicted to “Goodness”, to “virtue”.  I am increasingly inclined to view the whole edifice of Christianity, as it has developed since shortly after Christ’s death and resurrection, as a monster which feeds the vice of vanity, the “easy out” of submission in lieu of personal growth and responsibility, and the corruption of the natural impulse towards personal empowerment into that of political and even spiritual–so it is claimed, no doubt spuriously–dominion.  I have said this before, but I don’t feel Christ would recognize anything of himself or his teaching in the modern church.

Looks like drugs.

My take will be brief: however old you are, if you have not dealt with your past, it is still there.  All of Prince’s manic energy, his creative obsessiveness, came from somewhere.  It is likely that somewhere is demons he could not expel, could not process, and could not face.

I write journal entries to this very day talking about my parents.  At my age, this is ridiculous, or I would think it should seem so for many people.  But the work is done when it is done.  Until it is done, it is not done.  This should also be obvious.

And the goal is not navel gazing, but discovering or rediscovering a richer, fuller, more vibrant life.

In my considered view, most people run the same programs in their minds for most of their lives, and never really question who else they could be, how else they could be, what is most valuable in life, or how to develop the skill of systematically building the capacity for richer experience.  They work, and they get old.  They learn a bit along the way, but they miss almost everything.

That is my opinion.  It may be completely wrong.  I am a grouch, to be sure.  And I have concrete dust all over me, nearly put my eye out a couple hours ago, and managed to scar my nose tonight.

On the plus side, I found a bunch of Rod Stewart songs I had never heard.

I am reading Pema Chodron’s “When things fall apart”, and benefiting from it, as I suspected I would.  It is, I think, very good to get a woman’s perspective on Buddhist teachings.  Women in general are smarter than men.

And what I am realizing is that I entered adult life with a profound sense of helplessness.  This was carefully engineered into me by my parents.  This is not a revolutionary idea.

What is new for me is the realization that in the process of rejecting this feeling, of denying it, of trying to pretend that I am much more confident than I am, that things are much more in control than they in fact are, that it has been easier to engineer failure as a result of pride, than to admit what I was feeling.  I would rather protect a false sense of self, and crash the ship, than go there and be with something unpleasant.

No one could accuse me of avoiding negative feelings, but what I am coming to realize is that going into these feelings with compassion, and granting them the space to be, without trying to alter them, without trying to will them into non-existence or hiding, is the only path forward for me.  Everything else leads to a combination of arrogance, anger, and resentment, which in turn lead to regret and failure.

Some wise person once wrote that “forgiveness is giving up all hope of a better past”.  My new motto then is “abandon all hope of being someone other than who you are.”

And when I say who I “am” I am looking deeply, very introspectively. What you have done is unimportant compared to why and how you did it.  At the very bottom is where one finds the genuinely spiritual.  The task it to connect with that energy, identify with it in all its variegated beauty, and learn to expand and learn from it.  This is the purpose of life.

I had an economically productive day planned, but I think I am going to limit myself to the work I have to do, which is about 5 hours this evening.

I feel I am awakening from a dream, one which tells me that one must always be doing, doing, doing.  Laziness, so called, is vastly undervalued in our culture.  It would be possible on a large scale, now that we have made technology–robots–our slaves, if we had had sound money.

But our would-be, and perhaps largely actual, masters, are driven by the same manias–more so.  They, too, must be doing, doing, doing.  So all of us fall apart, and few remain to help us remember how to fall together.

I look at my books, my intellect, and I feel that “living” a “life of the mind” is really a continual process of treading water.  We have all seen those balloons and balls kept in the air in large crowds.  For an intellectual, if that ball every hits the ground, it is instant death.  Or so it feels.

A vast library is a large host of life rafts, of flotation devices, to keep one above the flood of emotion, of feeling.

And I wonder if perhaps the first and most important use of abstraction was not figuring out better ways to kill Woolly Mammoths, but negotiating the more intricate social landscapes that emerged as our brains developed.  The frontal cortex is, after all, the “social brain”.

And I wonder if, at a primitive biological level, the need to live in an abstract realm is an effort to recreate, or perhaps forge ex nihilo, in lieu of a time and sense of place that never existed for some of us, a sense of belonging.  One engages, evolutionarily, the capacity for abstraction when one is ensconced in a complex social, ritual, order.

But in our modern world, our alienated world, our modes of production have taken abstraction to an absurd level, to a level at which we cannot possibly hope to relate to the whole.  So we relate to abstraction itself, knowing that what we really want is impossible.  We can never land in socially complete place, of the sort the past several hundred thousand years conditioned us for.

I would say of both Marx and Freud that even though they were wrong about virtually everything, even when they were wrong, they were right.  Marx was not wrong to see “Entfremdung” as an aspect of industrialization, time clocks, “rational” modes of production, the buying and selling of time and thus human beings.  Note the “alien” in alienation, and the “fremd” in the German.

I feel myself floating.  I have always been floating.  So many of us are floating.  We struggle furiously to paddle this way or that, but mainly we have a relationship with paddling.  With one another, much less.

Hope begins with truth.  Thus, I see this post as quite hopeful.

Maxim: it is an absolute certainty that biologically rooted drives for social dominance will be expressed in all social orders, including those whose label is “egalitarian”.  If the field of competition is not the marketplace or actual battlefield, the battles will be political.  A ritual order will always be created.

Why do the Rockefellers and Castro admire one another so much?  They understand each other.  Communism is not and never has been anything but a very old story with a new title.  The King enjoys the ratification of History rather than God, but His prerogatives are no less, his abuse of power no less, and the injustice of the system no less than in the Egypt of the Pharaohs.

I am really feeling this morning the role of instincts, specifically social instincts, in shaping human behavior.  We are like dogs, or monkeys, or territorial birds.

We have reached a point where our reason will not allow us to consciously separate into tribes, where judgement of the Other is considered wrong.

But judgement of those who judge transexuals or gays, or even MEXICANS–who speak another language, act according to foreign cultural rules they frequently refuse to adapt to integrate here, and who are not even in this country legally–is considered wrong.  So you get the same judgement.  You activate that same social instinct.  You still separate into tribes.  The social instinct is served.  Nothing is transcended.

We need to exist within social orders.  The  Chinese and Hindus and others, in making absolute rules about family orders, and the relationship of families to the King and State and community and village and overall culture, were following natural human tendencies, the same that cause chimpanzees to have de facto kings, de facto “nobles”, and plebians, and to place all females in a low category.

The effort, of course, is to critique allegedly artificial and arbitrary social orders.  Why should women be inferior?  Why should some men be superior?  These are valid questions, and the conclusion that these emergent behaviors constitute injustices is reasonable.

But at the same time an actually excessive and utterly unfulfilled need FOR social order of precisely this sort, which is unrecognized in the frontal cortex, unprocessed, and thus unconscious, leads to behaviors like the grunting and groaning, ritual violence, throwing of sticks and that sort of thing, which has attended the North Carolina decision to honor and protect traumatized women who were terrified and triggered by the thought of men in their bathrooms.  You have tribal warfare, with one group claiming territory, and the other defending the territory, and particularly vulnerable female members of their social order.

Leftists in general are what they condemn.  I am decreasingly sympathetic to most conservative propaganda memes too, but appeals to tradition are always inherently appeals to systems that at some point in time, and for some period of time, have sufficiently met the needs of all involved that they were stable.

I don’t think anyone who has paid careful attention to women’s behavior over any period of time can fully forget or condemn Freud’s conclusion that women have a masochistic streak.  50 Shades certainly did nothing to dispel that.  Countless women are and have been happy in positions of overtly unequal authority.  Any man, obviously, who says he calls all the shots is either stupid or lying, but it has been common for women publicly to hide their influence and power.

From my own perspective, the question that most interests me is what creative energies–genuinely creative, not tearing down, breaking, expressions of rage and social exclusion, with most of Leftism being a de facto emanation of social exclusion–lie dormant in all of us.  What can women contribute that they are not contributing?  What can men and children contribute that they are not presently?

Creation and curiosity are the tools and pathways for growth.  Time and patience are the soil.

I look around me and see so much futility.  So much waste. So many people running around trying to save the world, and shitting on everything and everyone they touch without seeing it, without being able to care, since they are animated by manic energies they cannot touch consciously, cannot own, cannot see, and which laugh at them, like the demons in bad movies.

http://hijackingofhappiness.com/

He talks about the manufacture of consent dating back to the Wilson era.  About 2/3rds of it is quite interesting.  Then you realize that he, too, is selling something.

But I am seeing with increasing clarity how the American Dream, as we have inherited it, is a chimera.  It is an economically useful myth; it is propaganda, formulated for the purpose of training people to be useful drones.

I think of the movie “They Live” and have to say it does sometimes feel like this whole world is a big inside joke, played on most of us, by a very small number.

But the joke isn’t very funny.  I think of Chekhov’s story “A doctor’s visit”

“Fifteen hundred or two thousand workpeople are working without rest in
unhealthy surroundings, making bad cotton goods, living on the verge of
starvation, and only waking from this nightmare at rare intervals in
the tavern; a hundred people act as overseers, and the whole life of
that hundred is spent in imposing fines, in abuse, in injustice, and
only two or three so-called owners enjoy the profits, though they don’t
work at all, and despise the wretched cotton. But what are the profits,
and how do they enjoy them? Madame Lyalikov and her daughter are
unhappy — it makes one wretched to look at them; the only one who
enjoys her life is Christina Dmitryevna, a stupid, middle-aged maiden
lady in pince-nez. And so it appears that all these five blocks of
buildings are at work, and inferior cotton is sold in the Eastern
markets, simply that Christina Dmitryevna may eat sterlet and drink
Madeira.”

It is always better to be on the inside, I suppose, but at what cost?  We can assume there are power elites, obviously.  The only question is how unified they are, and what purpose or purposes they pursue, other than more of everything: money, power, influence, pleasure.

I did the logical analysis on all this some time ago in my post “Perfection”.  What is interesting, or might be interesting, to aspiring tyrants is the process of seduction.  Chasing women is something I’ve always found interesting myself.  But I find that once I catch one, quite usually I no longer want her. This is why I have done little chasing for some years.  I was once good at it, but no more.

Is Fidel Castro a Christina Dmitryevna, able to enjoy his food and wine because he is a moral imbecile, incapable of seeing much less caring about the suffering all around him?  Is he a clinical sadist, and if so, how often does he get the sorts of pleasures such people enjoy?  Does he go to his political prisons often?

But even that must be tiring after a time.  Both Castro’s must often be bored.  There is little to do.  What energy they may expend must be devoted to corrupting and ruining other nations.  I know they have agents of influence in the United States.  Again: chasing, not catching, is the pleasure.

I’m rambling.  I just wonder how worth it the lust for power and wealth is for the power elite.  I cannot believe it satisfies well, and to the extent it does, it is due to their mental and emotional sickness, both of which make true satisfaction and pleasure quite impossible.

http://www.infowars.com/saudi-arabia-is-a-cancer-on-the-world/

I think we can with reason ask if the “Syrian”–in quotes, because the actual people seem to come from all over the Middle East and Asia, and many of them seem not to have been touched by war at all–diaspora was not a planned outcome of the civil war Saudi Arabia did so much to fund and foment.  Why WOULD they take refugees when the goal is exporting misogynistic, theocratic homophobia to a decadent, sybaritic, unprincipled West?

You want to put an average leftist in a state of paralysis?  Point out to them brown people commit all the same crimes white people do, and they are STILL WRONG.  They don’t have a category for this.  It’s not something Howard Zinn ever mentioned.

How is it that people are boycotting North Carolina, and condoning the Middle East?  Cirque du Soleil cancels NC, but goes to Dubai or somewhere like that, where women can be beaten with impunity, nine years old is the marrying age, at least legally, and where gays are terrified.

Is rape wrong, or isn’t it?  If so, then ISIS must be condemned in CLEAR terms by the people who claim to value the lives and rights, and feelings of women.

And I was pondering this, and it occurred to me that the world is complex.  This complexity is scary to childish minds, who find the need to provide themselves and others simplifying narratives.  To provide simple Good Guys and Bad Guys.  To put white hats or black hats on everyone.  To enjoy, in other words, the emotional privileges of routine and unreflective prejudice that they cannot stomach in others.

Wringing debate from the hands of dictators–to dictate is to say what is and isn’t so, with no threat or fear of contra-diction–was the principal step in the direction of liberalizing human societies.  Wringing silence from those who would debate is a move in the opposite direction.  It is counter-Liberal.  Anti-Liberal.  The antithesis of everything they SAY they stand for.

But children will be children.  Life is complex.  It is hard taking into account varying stories, varying perspectives, differing agendas, competing selfishnesses, lies, cheating, and the confusion of ambiguity.  But this is what mature, genuinely good minds and spirits MUST do.  Everything else is a fucking lie.